I wondered how to explain to someone the Bible who had no prior knowledge of it. How do you explain it and where do you begin. This is what I came up with. Okay, so start at the beginning then. God created the universe. The Bible says 6 days (on the 7th he rested so not a day of creation. This may be hard to believe. It has been debated for a long time weather it was a literal 6 days is not. It will be debated until God comes down and explains it. Just believe God created the universe and the 6 days he says he has his own meaning for. There are scientists who have been studying universal background radiation that was present at the big bang and have been able to divide it down into 6 phases they believe symbolize the 6 days God mentions, but that is still speculation. The important thing to understand it God made it all. Another important thing to know is YOU DON’T HAVE TO UNDERSTAND IT ALL AT ONCE. It takes time. Most people are still learning themselves. So God made Adam and Eve. The serpent that represents evil (devil or Lucifer) tricks eve into believing God has lied. She wants to be wise like God so she eats. It is not a sin to desire to be like God for God is perfect. But she disobeyed God’s command and believed God lied to her. She ate and sin entered the world. Adam followed too. It is not all eve’s fault as some male supremacists will claim. Men are just as guilty. God said that the hour they ate it they would surely die. This was a spiritual death. Not a physical one. That is they died to God. They were separated from him and it is also interesting to know that it follows the same pattern with own growth cycle. Children grow and are innocent until puberty and then it is like the person they were die and they become someone else. Full of anger and hormones and loose their innocence. But that is just from my own mind and not taught anywhere. But that is the big and short of it with sin. Since the eating of the fruit all mankind has a sin nature. This is what leads us to doing it and separates us from God and being filled with a spirit of goodness. We can’t be good without him leading us. The world after the fall of mankind proves it. Starting with Cain who killed Abel to the fest of the world becoming so vile God killed them all with the flood. And now look at the world we live in today. Thanks to God’s leading we kept the world from going completely bad again, but it is still heading in that direction. Just taking longer. Giving God’s followers time to save those they can before he passes judgment. So all are sinners. Me, you, everyone. That is where Jesus comes in, but not yet. Abraham is called for God to set up his own special people. He creates the Jews to set up a priesthood for himself to bless and lead the world, but they fail to be righteous enough. But God still manages to set up a priesthood and give them the ten commandments. This is God’s standards. We of course can’t live up to them completely, but God is the standard and he can’t change to suit us. It may seem like he is strict that is because he is perfect. He is Just, he is righteous. He is unchanging. He is also love and mercy and peace. He wants to be in a relationship with us. He loves us. But we are sinners and the two don’t mix. We can’t enter his presents without is righteousness killing us. Think like this. The tabernacle they built in the desert to take with them was to be God’s dwelling place among them. Only the high priest could enter there and only after a ceremony to cleans himself. He wants us, but we aren’t holy enough by ourselves. We are unclean to God. God sets the standard for holy. He sets up the priesthood to allow us to be cleansed and draw near to him. There is a problem though with it. Namely the priests. They are not perfect and the animals they sacrifice are not perfect. Before the priests can offer atonement for the people they must first offer atonement for themselves. And this must be repeated because the people are not perfect enough to stay clean after it is done. The system has a flaw. It is important to note that animal sacrificing does not please God. For the price of sin, blood had to be paid. This was a requirement. It doesn’t please God to kill. But the price of sin is death. Payment had to be made. But you have to remember that dead to us does not always mean dead to God. I believe animals have souls and when will kill them for whatever reason they return to God. So skip ahead and Jesus is born to Mary. He is born without sin. He is perfect in God’s eyes. Just as the priests had to sacrifice a lamb without blemish Jesus is the lamb of God without blemish (sin) There is theories that the stable he was born in was the same one that is used to house the lambs that were raised for sacrificing. It was near Bethlehem where Jesus was born. He gave his life to be the perfect sacrifice for us. So we could repent of sin and draw closer to God the way he wanted us to. Here is a good question. Who is God? Not an easy one. We talk about God and what he does, but who is he. Science says that the big bang was the beginning of the universe, but physics says that nothing can begin unless there is a trigger. An outside force that causes a reaction. Cause and effect. So for the universe to have a beginning there has to be an outside force to trigger it. Something that exists outside our own universe. This would be God. God said he created the light and formed the darkness. Notice he said formed the darkness. That is not to say that he didn’t make the darkness, but that he formed it. Like the light casts a shadow. Darkness is formed when light shines. This is a good analogy for good and evil. God is good. He is the standard of good. He did not create evil, He can not do any evil act. He did form evil in that He sets the standard for good so that anything that does not measure up to that standard is evil. A man fell in a hole. If you stop and pull him out that is good. It is a good act, therefore if you see him and ignore him and leave him there in the hole without trying to help him. That is evil. It is an evil act. If you want a good Bible try the Life application Bible. It uses modern language without the thy and tho and gives commentary at the bottom about what is going on and why. Sometimes historic information about the culture and time periods.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 01:51:05 +0000
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